This event is part of the Brunel University London ‘Knowing Our Rights’ research project.

Chair – Roy Greenslade

Roy Greenslade is one of Britain’s foremost media teachers. He is a leading commentator and columnist on the media, and currently blogs for The Guardian. As a journalist he rose to the highest levels of management in a career taking in The Sun, the Sunday Times, and culminating in the editorship of the Daily Mirror.

Speakers

Professor Anthony Glees – Director at the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, University of Buckingham.

Anthony Glees is a Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and directs its Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies. He has a specialist concern with Security and Intelligence Issues and has written and lectured on a range of these issues, from the British Intelligence, the Stasi, to terrorism and counter-terrorism. He is a member of the international advisory boards of the Centre of Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism at Macquarie University, Australia the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London, the Research Institute for European and American Studies in Athens, Greece and the Oxford Intelligence Group. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Intelligence and National Security and The Journal for Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism and the Advisory Board of The Journal of Intelligence Ethics.

Pat Magee – a former IRA member.

Pat Magee was jailed for his part in the 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, and released in 1999 under the Good Friday Agreement.

Professor Will Self –  Writer.  Brunel University London.

Will Self is the author of nine novels, six collections of short stories, three novellas and six non-fiction works; he is a prolific journalist and a frequent broadcaster. His fiction has won various awards – as has his journalism. His 2002 novel Dorian, an Imitation was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and his novel Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction has been translated into over 22 languages, and he contributes to publications in Europe and the US as well as the UK.

Tasnime Akunjee – Lawyer

Grace Gao

Grace Gao is daughter to Gao Zhisheng – a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer who is best known for his work defending Christians, Falun Gong adherents, and other vulnerable social groups. As a result of his work on ‘sensitive’ cases and his open letters to Chinese political leaders, he was subject to numerous incidences of enforced disappearance and torture before being convicted of ‘inciting to subvert state power’. After three years in prison, he was released on 7 August 2014 with serious health problems, and has been under effective house arrest. Since mid August 2017, he has been missing again. Gao has authored a comprehensive report detailing human rights abuses and related social issues in China in the year 2016. This is the first comprehensive human rights commentary written by a human rights lawyer still living in China and his commentary covers a wide range of human rights abuses, including violations of the right to freedom of religion or belief, abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang and the situation of lawyers and human rights defenders. Grace has worked tirelessly, raising awareness of her father’s situation and wider human rights issues in China.

Angela Gui

Angela Gui is the daughter of the Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai who is believed to have been abducted by Chinese agents in Thailand in late 2015. Gui was one of the five men who vanished in a spate of incidents known as the Causeway Bay Bookstore Disappearances.  It is believed he was targeted due to his work as a publisher specialising in books critical of the Chinese Communist Party.  Gui resurfaced months later in a detention centre in China, and was made to publicly confess to crimes on Chinese state television.  There has been no presentation of charges or conclusive evidence for his alleged crimes.  Angela is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, and has been campaigning for her father’s release since he went missing. You can read her article in The Guardian here.

Isabel Hilton (Chair)

Isabel Hilton is a London-based international journalist and broadcaster. She studied at the Beijing Foreign Language and Culture University and at Fudan University in Shanghai before taking up a career in written and broadcast journalism, working for The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Guardian, and the New Yorker. In 1992 she became a presenter of the BBC’s flagship news program, “The World Tonight,” then BBC Radio Three’s cultural program “Night Waves.” She is a columnist for The Guardian and her work has appeared in the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Granta, the New Statesman, El Pais, Index on Censorship, and many other publications. She is the author and co-auothor of several books and is founder and editor of chinadialogue.net, a non-profit, fully bilingual online publication based in London, Beijing, and Delhi that focuses on the environment and climate change.

Ben Bland

Ben Bland is the South China correspondent for the Financial Times, currently working out of Hong Kong. Bland is the author of the recently published Generation HK – an exploration into the youth in Hong Kong, from activists, artists, writers and journalists, and the encroaching threat on their freedom of speech from the mainland. Bland has been a correspondent in Asia for almost a decade. Before Hong Kong he was based in both Indonesia and Vietnam.

Featured photo: A protestor is wrapped up with rope during a march calling for the release of missing booksellers in Hong Kong’s Mighty Current Publishing house, January 10, 2016.

Taking four years to complete (including the harrowing war in Gaza in 2014), Gaza Surf Club shows an incredibly engaging and enlightening story of a group of people whose similarities with our ‘human condition’ bring out the wrangling contrasts of our differences.

Director Philip Gnadt and Producer and Co-Director Mickey Yamine will be present post-screening for a Q&A with the audience.

Run Time: 87 mins

Watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/185917266